Sweetman Podcast

We are back with the fourth episode of We All Float Down Here — A Stephen King podcast. And we are talking The Stand— the 1978 epic novel, and its 1994 and 2020 miniseries’ — but we are discussing the 1990 Complete and Uncut version of the novel, since that’s the one in circulation these days. (And the one we read).

The podcast goes out on YouTube first and foremost — so we’d love you to like and subscribe over there.

But also adding it here so you can find it on Substack, and your favourite podcast providers like Spotify if you just want the audio.

Thanks for reading Sounds Good! ! This post is public so feel free to share it.

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One year, when I gave up on university before it gave up on me, I made a last ditch effort to climb the hill and instead of going to class I studied the wall at Student Job Search, saw a piece of paper with a listing for a bookstore job. I’d always wanted one of those. So I took up the slip and registered. I aced the interview. And that was me. The new me. A worker. I’d pop down The Terrace and onto Lambton Quay and report for duty. It wasn’t a ‘great’ bookshop. But it did have books. And books are great. I found a few new favourites. But mostly we sold magazines and cards and last-minute gifts. And the books we did sell were filled with pictures and recipes or were signed by All Blacks.

One day I turned up there and the store’s owner – a grumpy cliché – was furious to find that this store was soaked. Someone had left a firehose running overnight and it had leaked through the ceiling tiles and saturated many of the cards and their envelopes. Not many books were water-damaged but the carpet was soaked. I told the boss I was sorry. And he said, “never mind that, the real fucker in all of this is the insurance won’t yet cover it. Help me push a few things over”. I thought it was a strange, dark joke. So I did my best laugh – but he looked angrily at me, as is to say we had some real work to do. And he lunged mightily at one of those rotating towers of trinkets and cards. Into the drink! Then he pushed another. “Well come on!” he bellowed.

I didn’t feel comfortable shoving anything into the water so I made out I was doing other important things – we had to get the store ready to open still. So I found a broom and swept a few puddles out of the way of the door. I told him I would get the float counted (haha, float). And start sorting out the backroom.

It was a weird day.

And then at morning tea time, Angry Boss walked past me and dumped a handful of these grotesque soft-toy frogs into the kitchen sink. He turned on the tap and ran them a cold bath.

As I made my cuppa from the zip he said, “Hey matey, you mind turning over my frogs”. And he laughed a great deal. Like he was finding new ways to fuck with the system man. This flood had provided him with an opportunity.

I worked with a woman who drove in from Lower Hutt every day with her two daughters. Which is to say I worked with all three of them. The youngest daughter was about 16 I reckon. The older one was about 19. They all smoked. Shared the same pack, and would take turns going out for a dart. None of them read. Apart from the magazines. The youngest was quite chatty and reckoned it was a great job, way better than school. Her favourite thing was ripping the covers off magazines that didn’t sell. She got to keep the back bit of the magazine. Which counted as reading. And sometimes she’d rip an extra cover or two off so she could keep those as well.

I did my best to get as involved as I could. I made a couple of up-sales, did my recommends. Managed to have a decent ‘book’ chat once a day on average. Nothing like the dozens of great book-chats I’d have in the two other bookstore jobs I would go on to have. But you got to start somewhere. And this is where I started.

But I couldn’t stay long. If the frogs and the insurance ‘top-up’ wasn’t enough. If the same pack of smokes being torn through every two days by three cackling non-readers wasn’t a grind, then it all got to be too much when Angry Boss removed me from the store and sent me upstairs to run his “Christmas Pop-Up Shop”.

He told me, outright, that “the girls” were good for business. They “looked good”. I “did not”. So I was better placed away from the main store and upstairs to take money off people that were never in need of any guidance – beyond a simple finger-point towards more ribbon or the different types of wrapping paper.

And if I thought I was above all that water-damage – literally on the next level – I was still guilty by association; Angry Boss was grabbing armfuls of things from ‘my’ store and taking them down the escalator to chuck into his puddle.

I would buy a crate of beer in the weekend and have a tall bottle each night after work, the rest over Friday and Saturday. It was an okay life. I was writing as much as I could at night. And I felt like I was actually doing something. Even though the job was getting worse each day.

Finally, I realised that Angry Boss was never going to get better, would never be calmer. Not with Christmas around the corner. He yelled at me in front of a customer once. Got the wrong end of the stick and blamed me for something someone else had done (or actually, hadn’t done as it were). The customer apologised to me after Angry Boss raged out. That shouldn’t ever happen.

On the 23rd of December I left my shift, after after being yelled at by the boss – and in front of customers. I stayed back for five extra minutes, found a spot to hide and construct a brief, handwritten resignation. Saying that it was effective immediately. I mean I was basically walking out. But I figured if I stated that it would bind in some way.

I stuffed the messily written note in one of the spare envelopes from the cards. I stashed it on his desk, sticking out so he might see it, but also might not see it straightaway. I needed time to do a casual walk out – like it was just any other shift and not also the final shift. He’d find out after I was gone that I was gone. I was doing a runner on the eve of Christmas Eve. Finishing up and leaving him in the lurch before the busiest day of the year. I knew I was a bit of a jerk for this. But I had reconciled that he was a way bigger jerk. So. There.

No way was this bookworm going to be flippin’ frogs in the sink in between serving scowling people with no patience, stressed to be in a line to get last-minute knickknacks and black-covered novelisations.

I turned the corner outside the store. And I started to run. Just in case, really. But also because I was chasing after something that felt super earned. Freedom. Freedom. I almost screamed it.  And when I made it home to the flat I put a George Benson record on, used a fish-slice to un-cap a beer and nursed it in front of my stereo. I rang one of my mates and had a fucking good laugh.

PostScript to this story…

I’ve never left Wellington. I moved her to be a student, and found a home — eventually a degree. In the opposite order of the way most go about it. The bookstore where this story takes place is no longer standing, but I walk past the scene of the crime most days now, on the way to ‘grown up’ work.

The statute of limitations is well past, eh.

I was struggling to concentrate at uni, so I took a full-time job in this store, and that was my life for a while. At home, I’d write poems, and this is when I started writing short stories too. I wrote a bunch of them — the same George Benson album (above) made an appearance in another (completely fictional) short story. God knows why that was a favourite? But it is a great wee record.

I was also taking it very seriously that I had a ‘gig’ writing music reviews for New Zealand Musician, and I’d started my column for the Capital Times where I’d eventually just start making up the names of fake-bands to write about. But that’s arguably another story…

It was a pretty great summer, but it was pretty bad too. Things would eventually get better. Of course. But before then, they only got worse..

Let me know if you like this sort of thing, with the audio version of the story as an option sometimes.

A couple of years ago I recorded a few of these stories, with crude musical backing, and released an album or two on Bandcamp under the name Second Storey Teller.

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Alright, it’s time for the third episode of We All Float Down Here — A Stephen King podcast. We are talking The Shining — the 1977 novel, and the 1980 Stanley Kubrick film adaptation. (Heck, we even talk a bit about the 1997 TV movie/mini-series).

The podcast goes out on YouTube first and foremost — so we’d love you to like and subscribe over there.

But also adding it here so you can find it on Substack, and your favourite podcast providers like Spotify if you just want the audio.

Sounds Good! is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Sounds Good! is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Get full access to Sounds Good! at simonsweetman.substack.com/subscribe

Last night, as part of Phantom Billstickers National Poetry Day, I was honoured to be both the MC and one of the poets reading at an event held at Wellington’s divine secondhand bookstore and venue, Undercurrent.

It was a wonderful line-up of poets, a dream to be part of this cast — and to get to introduce them all. I recorded my set, where I read six short pieces from the upcoming book, ‘The Richard Poems’. And now you can hear those poems here regardless of whether you were there on the night or not.

Sounds Good! is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Sounds Good! is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Get full access to Sounds Good! at simonsweetman.substack.com/subscribe

I’ll have shared this story already — at least for paying subscribers — but here’s an audio-rendition (for all). I’m reading the story, and I’ve created the musical backing there, in my primitive way (under my Second Storey Teller alias). Anyway, it came up recently that I carried the Commonwealth Torch as part of the build up to the 1990 games. My dad still has a videotape he won’t part with, and, you guessed it — he doesn’t have a VCR. Anyway, here’s that story, in audio form, or you can read it below.

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When the Commonwealth Games were held in Auckland in 1990 I was chosen to carry the torch on a relay-run that went up the country. I was picked due to my involvement in rep hockey and for the 1km run along Napier’s Marine Parade I was flanked by two older chaps, local runners or sportspeople – I can’t remember. I held the actual torch – they carried placeholders, like a silver and bronze.

We were gifted branded clothing, hat, shirt, socks, shorts and a wrist-band. And we stood waiting – with nothing to say to each other – as the torch arrived, some other team of three had run it for a k’ and were to hand it over, along with the fake copies.

I got to jog a step ahead of the other two, out in front.

There’s a certificate in a photo album at mum and dad’s house. It’s printed on that cheap fax-paper. It looks more like an invoice. And in the shed, in a box, there’s a videotape of the whole ordeal. My dad won’t part with it, despite no longer owning a VCR.

I told him, most recently, to dump it. We don’t need that – nor the hours of rep hockey games (the practice runs that had got me to this dance). He snapped back that he was thinking of one day having them all digitised.

Gonna get them on a DVD.

Way to move with the times. How very 21st Century. But I secretly hope he does “get them digitised” – or at the very least that Commonwealth Games tape…You won’t see my dad, but you’ll hear him, providing an unwanted, unavoidable soundtrack. He ran the whole thing, backwards the Ginger Rogers to our Fred Astaires. Slugging a giant camcorder over his shoulder, like roadkill to take home to his family; his trophy.

Huff. Puff. Huff. Puff. In. Out. Breathe and blow and sniff and snort.

What a bloody good sort eh. In jeans and jandals, no corporate branding. An agile wee fucker. He’s the one that deserves a medal.

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Three ‘Richard’ Poems here in a recording at home. I read them earlier tonight at the Fringe Bar. And it went well — I think. Apart from me botching the audio recording. There were some gasps — at the use of the word ‘faggot’ and some of the anger and energy of these poems. And I wish I had that recorded. Instead I have this recording. And you have it too — if you’re interested.

You can read along, or read instead by checking out the individual poems here:

I must try to record a few more of these like this. I quite like assembling little ‘jazz trios’ of poems to sit and hang together. These are all brutal, short poems, but my hope is they take on something else when huddled together, if nothing else they are a support for one another.

Perhaps asking you to ‘enjoy’ them is the wrong word altogether. But I still hope it’s not entirely the wrong notion.Thanks x

Thanks for reading Sounds Good! ! This post is public so feel free to share it.

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Hey there, here we are with the second episode of We All Float Down Here — A Stephen King podcast. We talk about the book Salem’s Lot and the 1979 and 2004 film versions. There’s also a third film adaptation on the way…

The podcast goes out on YouTube first and foremost — so we’d love you to like and subscribe over there.

But also adding it here so you can find it on Substack, and your favourite podcast providers like Spotify if you just want the audio.

Thank you for reading Sounds Good! . This post is public so feel free to share it.

Get full access to Sounds Good! at simonsweetman.substack.com/subscribe

Hello and welcome to the We All Float Down Here podcast. Today we talk in detail about Stephen King’s debut, Carrie, what we love, what we don’t love as much, and same applies to all the movies.

The podcast goes out on YouTube first and foremost — so we’d love you to like and subscribe over there.

But also adding it here so you can find it on Substack, and your favourite podcast providers like Spotify if you just want the audio.

Sounds Good! is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Thank you for reading Sounds Good! . This post is public so feel free to share it.

Start writing today. Use the button below to create your Substack and connect your publication with Sounds Good!

Get full access to Sounds Good! at simonsweetman.substack.com/subscribe

This is a first go at recording a video of a new poem. The text can be read or shared here:

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Thank you for reading Sounds Good! . This post is public so feel free to share it.

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Hey there, here’s a new set of recordings — more from the files of ‘The Richard Poems’.

You’ll remember I have shared two previous times reading, as I try to get to grips with these new poems, and work on the idea of creating an actual show:

And, if you’re playing at home, I like to give you the option to read along — so below are the poems featured in this podcast in their print/text ‘readings’.

As always, very happy for your feedback. Will take your silence as some proof I’m on the right track :)

“Happy” listening / reading…

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